According to the Foundation Center’s analysis of data from the National Center for Charitable Statistics, there are approximately 1.5 million nonprofits in the U.S. According to the Q&A that Idealware conducted with Blackbaud, approximately 400 nonprofits are using the version of Common Ground that’s being killed. That’s about .026 percent of U.S. nonprofits. Obviously, if you’re one of those 400 you care deeply about the demise of Common Ground. But what about the rest of the nonprofit world? Here are some reasons that I’ve been thinking and hearing about:
- Nonprofits that were previously looking at Luminate are nervous about placing a bet on Blackbaud’s commitment to the Salesforce platform. Luminate was the top contender for one of my clients, but they’re strongly considering eliminating Blackbaud from further consideration. I doubt they’re the only ones.
- Nonprofits that are currently using Common Ground Enterprise, Luminate, and Convio Online Marketing are also nervous. I’ve been hearing from many large organizations that are wondering whether they should be looking elsewhere. (And of course Blackbaud’s competitors are only too happy to capitalize on these fears.)
- This could undermine nonprofits’ willingness to use cloud-based (aka Software as a Service or SaaS) databases. As I mentioned in my previous post about Common Ground, even though Blackbaud announced in 2006 that it was killing GiftMaker Pro (GMP), since the software ran on clients’ own servers it’s still in use. Blackbaud says it still gets calls from GiftMaker users, and we get questions from GMP users on TechSoup’s forums (here’s one from June 2012). But with a cloud-based system, when a vendor ends support or goes out of business the product can simply vanish.
- One of the discussions during NTEN’s community call about Blackbaud’s purchase of Convio was whether the nonprofit community should band together and build its own donor management system rather than being dependent on for-profit vendors. That discussion continued on my blog. I expect it will be strengthened by this move.
Thanks, as always, for contributing so much to the conversation. You’re a real treasure in our community! I wholeheartedly agree with your first and second points, but would argue that the scale there is still pretty small. And I have a hard time seeing that nonprofits will be less like to use cloud solutions because of this. Our own research shows that there are a good number of folks that don’t even think about software as cloud or not – they just know they access it through their browser.
I do see a number of vendors rushing to fill the (narrow) actual void and the (much bigger and more important) perceived void. There’s no doubt that the move signals that Blackbaud is committed to their Infinity platform above all else. I’d love to hear from community members about their own plans in the face of the news.